Former Washington Post writer Laura Blumenfeld joined the State Department on Monday to serve as the head of strategic communications for the Middle East Peace Process.

The Daily Beast reported Monday night that Blumenfeld, who covered the Middle East, national security and presidential politics for the Post for more than a decade, has joined the staff of Ambassador Martin Indyk, head of Secretary of State John Kerry’s peace process efforts. Blumenfeld most recently served as a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, where she worked on the Middle East and security issues.

Blumenfeld was a college student in 1986 when a Palestinian gunman shot her Rabbi father in the head in Jerusalem. She traveled to the West Bank and posed as a journalist to search for the gunman, an experience she chronicled in the bestselling book, Revenge: A Story of Hope.